Every week the Opus team picks a news story or topic or idea that is relevant to the entrepreneurs and businesses we partner with.

RSS Feed

Archives

A boost to NFC?

Ajit Deshpande - - 0 Comments

In an announcement that is indicative of the increasing relevance of Near Field Communications (NFC) to the smartphone industry, Broadcom last week released a new quad-radio wireless chip that provides support to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM and NFC. This new chip follows Broadcom’s introduction in Sept’11 of a standalone NFC chip for smartphones. The company had projected at the time that roughly about 100 million smartphones with standalone NFC chips would be sold in 2012, a 10-15% share of overall smartphone device sales.

Near-field communication (NFC) technology has been an area of interest in the context of smart devices for more than five years now. The first NFC enabled phone was introduced by Nokia in January 2007, and over the years, more and more new NFC enabled phones have continued to enter the market. Yet, NFC is still a small portion of the handset market, and Broadcom’s new combo chip might just be the fillip NFC needs for greater adoption in handsets. Broadcom is the dominant seller of Wi-Fi/BT/FM combo chips, and to the extent it can control costs on the new quad-combo chip, NFC may now be able to latch on to the proven demand for the other communication standards. More importantly, with second largest combo-chip maker TI already selling an NFC combo chip, there is now enough momentum in the market to make NFC commonplace in handsets in the near future.

Are handsets then enough to create mass-scale adoption for NFC? Vivotech’s recent sale of its contactless reader business suggests that NFC adoption in handsets might at least be a necessary if not sufficient condition for the technology. Also needed is the adoption of large-scale use cases (the primary one being contactless payments) and platforms enabling such use cases (such as mobile wallets, secure elements, and enabling software such as that offered by Opus portfolio company Sequent). So the NFC battle is far from won, but Broadcom’s move, based clearly on ROI, suggests we are still on track.

« Back to Blog
Also on the Opus Blog

Identity Management from Salesforce

October 23, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - Last week, Salesforce announced the launch of Salesforce Identity, the company’s new cloud-based identity and access management platform that will simplify for IT administrators...

Outlook.com is off to the races!

August 5, 2012
Ajit Deshpande - On July 31st, Microsoft unveiled its new cloud-based email service, Outlook.com, complete with a simple and clean UI and featuring integration with its own SkyDrive as well as with...

New developments in the NoSQL world

September 17, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - Last week, the NoSQL database space saw a couple of interesting new announcements: First, Couchbase announced a new, mobile-focused database called Couchbase Lite. With Couchbase...

Google IO

July 1, 2012
Ajit Deshpande - For those interested in 'out there' technologies, the Google I/O developers' conference held last week was not a disappointment at all - at the conference, Google introduced...